


everybody loves jeannie

by kwritten



Series: Finding a Balance [10]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 10:58:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22575697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: moments fade, might as well hold on to them while you can
Relationships: Dawn Summers/Ginny Weasley
Series: Finding a Balance [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/202343
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	everybody loves jeannie

Being lonely didn't really occur to her as a problem. Not in the beginning of all of this.  
There were other, more important things to deal with.

Clothes, Food, Shelter.

Basic Adam-and-Eve-_bullshit_.

Somewhere in the desert, a whispered, _and without that pesky snake business_, never reached her ear - but did cause the hair on the back of her neck to stand on end.

If this was hell, it sure didn't work the way her mother had painted it.

Took a while to notice, though, that it wasn't all as dire as she presumed.

Or maybe, _first_ and _last_ and _middle_ got jumbled.  
Maybe, pain is truly relative.

It wasn't as dire as she presumed.

First (or maybe last) (or maybe never), the wind and sand tore her skin into leather; something she'd be proud to caress in a shop guiltily in another life. Almost as if she had been created to live in this desert beyond comprehension.

Then (or maybe all at once), the desperately _human_ desire to feel moisture on her tongue and throat, to chew and swallow and shit and feel her digestive tract working to keep her moving, it all was gone. She stopped to wonder what water tasted like, and laughed.

Then (or maybe never), her body never tired - she was more restless than she had ever known, more electric than she knew a body _could_ be. Her hard, soft, contradictory body lunged and laughed and ran and rolled in absolute bliss.

She was movement personified.

She wondered if she _was_ the wind.

She never forgot who she was before, because at some point all there ever was - were stars and sand and wind wind wind and the sun so bright it should have blinded her.

She tracked time in the freckles that appeared on her arms and legs and toes and stomach.

She tracked her hunger in the days that she ran instead of walked, in the stillness of a windless night, in counting the stars.

A hundred thousand nights....  
Or, a hundred million sunrises...  
Or, two freckles above her right anklebone later....

She _was_ no longer.

****

_It's not a djin-bottle, Luna-darling. It's just a weird antique. _

_I know a genie bottle when I see one. _

_She's been watching too many I DREAM OF JEANIE reruns. _

_'Mione why in Merlin's beard did you ever bring that horrible device to the house anyway?_

_Why? Because I'm still half-Muggle or something and after all that time away, I felt rather nostalgic for tv. Anyway, you weren't complaining when I made you watch EUROVISION last year, now were you?_

_Or the World Cup._

_Thank you, Luna-dear. OR the World Cup. _

_HURUMPH, as it were. Let's buy that horrible nightstand we came in here for and then sweets on me?_

_Not really a perk if your family owns the damn shop-- Oh! look out! It's falling ov--_

_My love please don't--!_

_***_

Tears. Wind. Sand. Sun. Salt.

Everything was salt.

She was salt.

This might as well happen, she supposes.

_***_

On the front step of the Summers residence, two winters after the world was supposed to end and three days before the beginning of Spring semester at UC Sunnydale, was a dingy package wrapped in brown paper and twine and what looked like a strange smudge of curry. Inside, covered fully in bubblewrap was what looked to Dawn like an ancient bong, but was assured was an oil lamp, and a note that said,_  
_

_IT'S BEEN MONTHS! HERE'S AN OLD LAMP. DEMON I STOLE IT FROM SAYS THE INSCRIPTION PUTS THIS CURSE AT OVER 2,000 YEARS OLD! GOOD PRACTICE FOR DAWNIE, NEW FRIEND FOR ME WHEN I GET HOME.  
XOXO  
ps- sam says hi_

Tara wrinkled her nose, "Anya called only just last week?"

"To say that she was going to hop dimensions with Fred for a while... they must have hit a time pocket," Cassie intoned drolly from the kitchen, where she and Veruca were cooking stir-fry.

It was Stir-Fry-day, after all.

Dawn kept the old lamp securely wrapped in bubbles on her desk for a month, while she and Olivia researched the demon script Anya had copied over for them. It was, indeed, an _ancient_ curse, there was no questioning results of the carbon-dating spell Dawn had written and perfected the previous year... but also strangely modern? A word they couldn't account for that finally Cordie confirmed via Skype was modern slang she'd heard at one of the demon clubs in LA.

"Hell dimensions play hell with time," Anne shrugged, putting an end to an argument between Dawn and Cassie on their way home from a late study session with Janice. There was half a tattoo on her forearm and a scar on her heart to prove it, the two younger girls each put an arm around her waist as they walked. Anne leaned her cheek onto each of their heads for half a moment. That scar was healing in ways she'd never imagined it could.

The whiteboard in the kitchen added lamp-curse speculation to it's _MARIOKART_-team scores and karaoke requests and accumulative grocery list.

Sunggyu's bet - that somehow in that old lamp they'll find the _real_ Jeannie from _I DREAM OF JEANNIE_ \- is just too ridiculous to **not** be the one everyone agrees must be the truth.

"It might as well happen," is Buffy's only comment on the matter. There's a Big Bad in the area, and she's been taking this whole _general_-thing rather seriously since Allison nearly died and Sunnydale nearly became a crater and Faith took the Slayerette's to the Argent estate in France.

Stopping _an_ Apocalypse isn't the end, if anything - it's merely the beginning.

There's a fine layer of dust over the notebook dedicated to various spells and research on the lamp, and most of the bubbles have been popped by Janice and Sunggyu - neither of whom seem to understand the word _dangerous_ when it is hurled at them in several panicked female voices - when Dawn stumbles back into her room after a particularly nasty close encounter with a world-ending event. There's a clump of blood in her long hair that might not be her own, and a throb coming from her kidneys that she's hoping can wait until morning, and a still-warm sword in her hand; when the lamp catches her eye.

With trembling fingers, caked in dirt and sweat and blood and ... something in the green-goopy-demon variety she'd rather not examine, she unwraps the lamp and whispers, "_ego autem oriri ex cinere_."

Ginny feels the kaleidoscope of reality shift back into place and finds herself staring wide-eyed at a grimy looking girl with bright green eyes in a dimly lit bedroom.

"You're naked."

Ginny wrinkles her nose, "You're dirty." And then she looks down at her pale, lightly freckled body, and hugs her arms around her chest.

Her skin! Is skin! It's soft and firm and by Merlin's balls she's _HUNGRY_.

Her stomach growls and she immediately bursts into tears.

_She's hungry._

What Dawn sees - is a cloud of dust and ash, a mountain appearing behind her on the bed.  
A fierce wind that whips the mountain and slowly siphons away at the heap until a naked, freckled, wild, red-haired woman stands triumphantly on her bed.

What Dawn feels - is her heart stuttering and her blood slowing in her veins and a tiny fraction of a hint of a memory of sand entering her bloodstream and she suddenly feels 2,020 instead of twenty and there's an ache and an itch and then her breath catches and her heart thumps at it's normal rhythm and a trickle of her own blood continues gliding down her palm.

What Dawn knows -

.......

Ginny eats pizza and Chinese takeout in the kitchen with the rest of the tired team of Scoobies, who erase all but _foreign wizard_ from the whiteboard, and everyone takes turn in the shower - Ginny and Dawn and Olivia ensuring that the water heater never slows down with a little whisper. She sleeps in Dawn's bed that night and snores softly, her tight, small naked body pressed firmly to Dawn's lean limbs as if she were trying to merge them - skin to skin, heart to heart.

It takes three days to convince her to wear clothes. Tara and Anne find oversized t-shirts and summer dresses at thrift stores and she acquiesces with a charming pout - strips down the minute she's behind Dawn's closed bedroom door.

It takes four weeks to convince her to contact her family - which she does with some imported ingredients from Fred and a letter written on parchment thrown into a fire. The Summers residence is suddenly _very_ aware of the previously unused fireplace, as letters and strange sweets begin appearing in green flame every twenty minutes.

It takes only three hours after appearing for her to convince Dawn that kissing can feel like drowning, and air is overrated, anyway.

It takes only a moment after opening her eyes for Ginny to _know_ that she was never leaving Dawn's side.

It takes upwards of three years for her life to filter back through her dried out mind. For her to forgive herself for walking away from it, never reaching backwards. It takes a lifetime again for her to grow accustomed to the novelty of hunger.


End file.
